Gotham, A Dead Man Feels No Cold

Wrath of the Villains

If I knew where the 13th episode of season two was going to end I would have better understand the title of last week’s instalment.

A Dead Man Feels No Cold is little glimpse into the future of one of the most scaring and terrific villains of the Batman’s universe.

Both this and the previous episode focused the storyline around the origin story of Victor Fries, the man who will become Mr. Freeze.

In the previous episode, following the events that brought Fries into looking for the cure to save his fiancé, the press already would call him with his villain name.

This week, Victor has to rescue his loved one from the hands of the Gotham City Police Department. He has discovered his able to cure her from her disease.

But things aren’t easy as they seem. Jim and company has a trap prepared when they decide to move Victor’s fiancé to Arkham. There would be the perfect place where she could receive medical assistance and at the same time the safest place where to keep her while Victor will try to rescue her.

Mr. Freeze, together with the help of Hugo Strange who, fort the first time, is actively involved in the scenes and ready to show his bad-guy-side, succeeds in entering Arkham’s facilities and found her fiancé together with Jim Gordon and Lee.

I would take a moment just to talk about Penguin. Since most of the episode takes place in Arkham, much of the attention is directed towards Oswald Cobblepot. He has been imprisoned and assisted with medical treatments as he is considered to be insane.

He is exposed to heavy treatments that apparently are torturing him. At same point towards the end of the episode, Oswald meets Jim and tries to get help from him denouncing what he’s been going through.

A cynical version of the Jim Gordon we have been knowing reassures Penguin that what happens inside Arkham is perfectly fine and it is for his own sake.

They aren’t torturing Penguin, they are just taking care of him.

We, spectators, however, are perfectly aware that things aren’t as they seem. Arkham is an evil place held by an evil character, Hugo Strange, who has plotting something really bad underneath the known floors of Arkham.

The last segment of the episode develops as everyone would expect. Victor succeeds in setting his fiancé free and tries to cure her, eventually failing thank to her desire to die. She swaps the freezing capsules making effortless any attempt of him to save her.

Victor eventually decides to put an end to his life, because of too much suffer for her death.

That’s how a random episode would have ended. But Gotham is Gotham and has tons of aces in the hole perfectly hidden and ready to come out at any given moment.

We are back inside Arkham’s hidden labs where Hugo Strange is facing a frozen glass window. In the exact same moment I was mad at the series for killing every potential major villain of Batman’s universe, we understand that something really cold is happening down there.

Inside the frozen glass wall there’s Victor, or what remains of his humanity. There’s Mr. Freeze, eyes and hairs completely frozen.

We understand from Dr. Strange that his body has somehow absorbed his own freezing formula and that is what made him survive after freezing himself to death.

Now he is only capable of surviving at a temperature below the zero. For this reason, Huge Strange tells him he has tweaked his suit in order to ensure a living.

And that was when Gotham actually created Mr. Freeze by letting Victor Fries die.